Soul searching. (Grapevine).

Photograph/Philosophy/Technology

University of Brighton, in conjunction with Photoworks and PhotoForum, Brighton, England.

April 26 - 27

Brighton, the quaint seaside resort on the coast due south of London, is becoming something of a photographic center in England. In the fall of 2003 It will host the first Brighton Photo Biennial, which will bring "...exciting and important photography from around the country and around the world" (as one of their promotional pieces announces) to this provincial college town. As a run up to this, on the last weekend this past April, the University of Brighton, in conjunction with Photoworks and Photoforum, presented "Photography/ Philosophy/Technology," a two day conference exploring photography, as noun, and its adjoining adjective, the photographic.

What the conference brought most clearly to the fore, was how much photographic discourse is still grappling with the crisis of indexicality brought on by the medium's digitization. It has inevitably caused a paradigm shift in the way that we conceive of and contextualize photography and the photographic image--it has in fact led to the separation of the two and forced us to consider the meaning and definition of each and their relation to one another. The conference was organized around two interrelated questions: what is the photograph, and, secondly, where is the photograph? The latter question implies as Olivier Richon stated, "...that we have lost sight of photography or that photography Is perhaps lost, that it has lost a direction perhaps or that we do not find It where it should be, that It has been misplaced, that it remains somewhere, unclaimed, in some lost property office of culture." Indeed.

Richon went on to point out a linguistic shift that has occurred In photography that reflects a deeper semantic, in fact semiological shift: the move from "photography" to "photographic," noun to adjective, and then back again to noun in "the photographic." This shift suggests a kind of semiological skinning of photography where the signifier is separated from the signified to be reconstituted as a sign itself. But this forces the question, what then Is the signified In "the photographic?" What is the thing to which it is tied? Here is where the ground goes a bit liquid and we begin to grapple around In the dark, trying to pin down this quite slippery thing. Quite unsurprisingly, this question forces us back to a reconsideration of photography's ontology, in hope that if we can come to some conclusions about It, that this will guide us in our dealings with the photographic.

So Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin were both strongly on the agenda at the conference. Both locate the roots of photography's ontology its ability to "embalm time." The language they use to describe photography's stoppage (Barthes calls it photography's "funereal immobility" in Camera Lucida) inextricably link it with death and locate it's power In the ability to overcome our existential struggle with the passage of time.

Geoffrey Batchen's paper, 'Fearful Ghost of Former Bloom: What Photography Is," examined the photographic reliquary--objects of mourning and memory created by grieving friends and relatives that Incorporate photographs and an eccentric array of collaged elements; wax or hair flowers, embroidery, taxidermy, personal artifacts. They are unique and highly idiosyncratic objects, and Batchen has found a fantastic array of them in all parts of the world, dating mostly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These photographic objects are memorials to the deceased, built around a photograph of the dead person. They are activated by the power of photography's "funeral immobility," which places the reliquary's subject in an eternal present, living on in a time outside of time. These reliquaries are a form of grieving, just as Barthes's Camera Lucida, the centerpiece of which is a snapshot of Barthes's deceased mother, is a form of grieving.

Batchen suggested at the end of his paper that we should take Camera Lucida seriously not just as a theory of photography, but as a history of photography. In making this assertion he encourages us to consider photography's vernacular in our construction of the medium. Once integrated into the history of photography, these objects necessarily change photography's ontology. They remind us that most semiological readings of photography are, as Peter Osborne noted in his paper "Photography in an Expanding Field: Distributive Unity and Dominant Form," marked by an ontological agnosticism or indifference, which discounts its psychological meaning. This is problematic because, as Batchen later pointed out in a plenary session, in Charles Sanders Peirce's discussion of indexicality, the sign's contiguity--typified by Barthes's "I am looking at the eyes that looked at the Emperor" from Camera Lucida--has a psychological component. Contiguity is the element that instigates emotion; the photograph is an interface in th e time-space continuum in which we live, linking us to another intangible past point and making us ache with the mortality that prevents us from reaching it. Its contiguity activates an existential longing.

But in the age of digitization, does photography's failure as an index deplete its psychological force? An anecdote to consider: this summer I moved from San Francisco--the place I grew up and where I lived as an adult--to London, an inter-continental, inter-cultural change. Before I left I had a going-away party and I took many photos of my friends with a new digital camera I had been given as a present. Several months later in London, I managed to mistakenly dump them into the trash of my computer and erase the lot. I had never printed them out, and hence had no actual photographs. But I opened them when I was lonely, and used the images as screensavers. When I accidentally erased them, it felt the same as if they had been photographs and I had lost them in a fire. They were irretrievably lost.

Richard Schiff's paper "Photographic Soul" examined just this issue of materiality in relation to the ontology of photography, questioning the definitions of photographic representation and where these definitions are grounded. As old analog media are transformed into the digital, we think of them as less material, he argued in the later plenary session, But are they? This seems to challenge the predominant idea that the crisis In indexicality facing the medium is a direct result of its technological transformation, a point argued by Peter Osbourne. Perhaps, however, its technological transformation is only a symptom of this crisis that originates in broader socio-cultural shifts. David Greene, one of the conference organizers, commented that photography is being thrown into sharper relief because of the arrival of digital photography. Will this finally allow us to consider what the relation of the photographic rather than photography is to the index? Are the semantics of indexicality changing? Returning to t he issue of contiguity, Batchen argued that because it is rooted in socio-cultural paradigms, it can shift and be associated with different kinds of signs. Despite the supposed lack of materiality of digital media, is there anything to stop it shifting to the photographic, our adjective turned noun?

These are questions that will continue to be debated in future discourse. At the end of the conference, there was a sense of being no nearer to answering the question "what is the photograph?," and as for "where is the photograph?," the answer, for the time being, remains unclaimed in that lost property office of culture. The proceedings of "Photography/Philosophy/Technology" will be published in the fall of 2002.

ALICIA MILLER is a former associate director of SF Camerawork and current head of education and public events at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.